John of Capistrano

John of Capistrano (Giovanni da Capestrano) was born in 1386 in the town of Capestrano in the Abruzzo, then part of the Kingdom of Naples. His father is described in the sources as a German knight who had come into Italy in Angevin service; his mother belonged to a family of the local nobility. He studied law at Perugia, acquired a reputation as an able jurist, and in the early 1410s was appointed governor of that city by King Ladislaus of Naples. During this secular career he contracted a marriage which later Franciscan and hagiographical accounts describe as unconsummated. In the course of hostilities between Perugia and the Malatesta of Rimini he was sent as an ambassador, seized, and imprisoned. Captivity became the occasion of a religious conversion, which the tradition of his order associates with a vision of Francis of Assisi.

After obtaining a dispensation from his marriage he entered the Observant branch of the Order of Friars Minor in 1416, receiving the habit under the influence of Bernardine of Siena, who remained his master and model. He was ordained priest about 1420. For more than three decades he preached across the Italian peninsula and later north of the Alps, drawing very large audiences. He championed the Observant reform within the Franciscans, visited and corrected convents, and held positions of government among the Observants. He was a leading defender of Bernardine when the latter's preaching of the Holy Name of Jesus came under attack, and he himself spread that devotion. Popes from Martin V onward employed him as a diplomat and as an inquisitor against groups judged heretical, including the Fraticelli in Italy.

From 1451, at the commission of Pope Nicholas V, he undertook an extensive mission in Central Europe, preaching in Austria, Bavaria, Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia, and Poland, with a particular brief against the Hussite movement. He appeared before princes and city councils as well as before popular assemblies in places such as Vienna and Kraków. The same years saw him involved in campaigns against Jewish communities; the proceedings at Breslau (Wrocław) in 1453, which ended in executions and expulsion, are the best documented of these episodes. He was a prolific writer of sermons, canonical opinions, and treatises on the Franciscan Rule and on the errors of those he opposed.

When Ottoman armies under Mehmed II pushed into the Balkans after the fall of Constantinople, Pope Callixtus III charged Capistrano with preaching a crusade in support of the Kingdom of Hungary. In 1456, already an old man, he joined John Hunyadi at the siege of Belgrade. He rallied crusading volunteers and, during the fighting in July 1456, took a conspicuous part in the sorties that forced the sultan to withdraw. The victory was proclaimed throughout Latin Christendom. Disease then swept the Christian camp. Hunyadi died in August; Capistrano, weakened by exhaustion and infection commonly identified as plague or dysentery, was removed to Ilok (Újlak) in Syrmia, where he died on 23 October 1456. He was buried in the Franciscan church of that town, which later bore his name.

Veneration grew first among the Observants and in Hungary, where he was remembered as a preacher and as a figure of the 1456 campaign. Pope Alexander VIII canonized him in 1690. The Roman calendar keeps his feast on 23 October. He is honoured as a patron of Hungary, of jurists, and of military chaplains, and his tomb at Ilok has remained a place of pilgrimage.